A Game of Thrones: Genesis Promises More Than Trailer Shows

I finally started reading George R.R. Martin's fantasy epic A Song of Ice and Fire starting, of course, with A Game of Thrones. It's fantastic. He creates a fully fleshed-out world, touches on an 8,000-year-old backstory, and carefully avoids making anyone out to be too much of a good guy or a bad guy.

But somehow, these types of sprawling worlds always seem to get turned into barely passable (or just plain terrible) RTS games. It happened to Dune, Lord of the Rings, Starship Troopers...the list goes on. And that's exactly what it looks like we'll be getting from A Game of Thrones: Genesis.

If the trailer above were for a free-to-play Facebook game, I'd be pretty damn excited. But no, this is a retail PC game that just looks like a Facebook game. However, the game's press release does say that you'll be able to use your fair share of "treasons, espionage, kidnapping, and ransoms...It is also very possible, by cleverly using all the low blows the game allows you to use, to earn victory without ever entering an open war or recruiting any army."

I'm not sure exactly what that means, but if it just involves spamming a family's "special ability" and there's no real strategy involved, I'll be a bit disappointed. The game releases next week on Steam, so I guess we'll find out if there's more to this than terrible-looking dragons soon.